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Summaries/reviews of further mainstream views

1.) Consciousness: An Introduction - Susan Blackmore - Easy to read clone of Dennett and connected ideas on consciousness

2.) Dennett and the deep blue sea - Burton Vorhees - Attacks Dennett's seminal book, 'Consciousness Explained'.

3.) How could conscious experience affect brains? - Max Velmans

1.)

Consciousness: An introduction

Susan Blackmore

This is a readable summary of the various mainstream ideas on consciousness that have been developed over the last twenty years. Although it is clearly not the intention of the author, the clear and relatively brief exposition of the main theories brutally exposes logical weaknesses that can sometimes be obscured by hundreds of pages of learned detail. In particular, the book is very much in thrall to Daniel Dennett and his Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, and even mainstream approaches to consciousness tend to be marked down if they depart from Dennett. Dennett’s core ideas are discussed in the separate review of his most important book, ‘Consciousness Explained.’

A further problem of Blackmore’s book is the undue attention given to the fact that the brain is subject to many form of illusion. This seems to be intended to chip away at the reality of consciousness. Nowhere does Blackmore stop to ask whether it would be possible to have an illusion if one was not conscious in the first place. An insentient object such as a stone or a table would not be expected to have an illusion, and illusions in fact appear to be one of the functions of consciousness. P. In the middle part of the book, there comes the now traditional materialist exercise of showing that the self is an illusion, comprised of the demarcation of the body from the rest of the world and the narrative history of the body as coded into the protein of the memory. The discussion neglects to mention that the self is not consciousness, but merely a part, albeit an important part, of the contents of consciousness. Altered states of consciousness, in which the sense of self is obliterated or merged with the world/nature/universe, but there is still something that observes are also left out of account.

Blackmore tries to establish that consciousness is an evolved feature. The problem she fails to tackle here is that evolution selects for useful attributes and against useless ones, as a waste of energy. If consciousness is physical attribute it has to tie up a certain amount of energy, probably rather a lot as the brain is notoriously energy intensive. But the whole direction of the rest of the book has been to the effect that consciousness does nothing, so why should evolution have selected for it. There is no attempt to answer this question, in fact there is no indication of an awareness that the question exists.

Later in her book, Blackmore draws on the work of the biologist Nicholas Humpherys. This leads first of all to the idea of consciousness of an emergent property. The classic example of an emergent property is the liquidity or wetness of water. This is not the property of individual hydrogen or oxygen atoms, but when these combine into a sufficient number of molecules at the right sort of temperature we find this property of wetness. Consciousness might well fit into this category, but there is still a problem. When properties do emerge as in the case of wetness, it is then easy to trace them back to the original physical components, in this case the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and the electromagnetic bonds that operate between them when they are configured into water molecules. The problem with consciousness is that it has not been possible to trace it back to physical components within the brain.

Another idea derived from Humphrey is that of self reflexiveness. The idea that humans at least evolved some form of inner eye to observe the brain’s activity as distinct from previous sensory organs that had been targeted at the outside world. The most serious problem is that there is no reason for this inner observation to create consciousness. The inner organ or nucleus could be non-conscious and report its findings to the other non-conscious parts of the brain by the usual synaptic connections. There is no requirement and no physical basis for this function to have the extra physical property of consciousness.

Another concept that is developed is the idea that consciousness evolved as a function of the development of language. Again there are two problems with this approach. In the first place, there appears no reason to think that a non-conscious device could not master the processes of communication by means of language. The second is that even if we assume that consciousness was evolved to facilitate these processes, we still lack a description of its physical basis. Elsewhere Blackmore also touches on the idea that consciousness emerged from the use of symbols. Here again there is no explanation as to why the non-conscious use of symbols would not suffice as they do in effect for modern machines.

The discussion of quantum consciousness is the weakest part of Blackmore’s book. She mentions only the Penrose/Hamerroff version of quantum consciousness. She starts off by describing how in sufficiently powerful mathematical systems propositions can be formulated, which can not be proved or disproved by the system, and that Penrose thinks that mathematical understanding in human brains derives from non-computable activity in the brain. She describes how Penrose has proposed that there could be a different version of wave function collapse, when systems are isolated from the environment, and that this might give access to a non-computational judgemental process, and how Hameroff has identified the microtubules as a possible site for quantum coherent activity in the brain. Blackmore then tries to refute Penrose/Hameroff as quickly as she can. First she turns to a ‘futurist’ called Ray Kurzweil, who appears to argue that both computers and humans that can only estimate Gödel type propositions. This really misses the point that the human efforts are claimed to be non-computational, while those of the computer are of necessity based on algorithms, because a computer is only a system of algorithms. Blackmore then tries to wrap the matter up by quoting a number of points from an article by the philosophers Grush and Churchland. However, she fails to mention a response by Penrose that answered the points quoted by Blackmore. As a result, a number of points repeated by Blackmore would appear to be in error. She claims that the fact that microtubules exist throughout the body and can be disrupted by drugs without any resulting loss of consciousness disproves the theory. However, this ignores the fact that brain microtubules are different from those in the rest of the body, mainly because they are more stable. The drugs referred to have been shown not to disrupt brain microtubules. It is claimed that some anaesthetics do not act on microtubules, but this claim appears to exaggerate the still inprecise knowledge of where and with what intensity anaesthetics act in the brain. Blackmore mentions the strongest argument against quantum consciousness, which is the rapid decoherence to be expected in the conditions of the brain. However, she does not mention Hameroff’s discussion of possible screening of the microtubules so as to allow the persistence of quantum coherence. Nor does she mention other theories that suggest that metabolic pumping of energy could sustain coherence under brain conditions. In the closing part of the section on quantum consciousness the discussion compounds these errors and omissions by missing the whole point of the Penrose theory. Blackmore claims that even if there were quantum computing in the brain it would not brings us any nearer to understanding the basis of consciousness. However, Penrose himself argued that quantum computing would not of itself produce consciousness. Consciousness would derive from the wave function collapse giving access to the underlying and non-computable geometry of space time.

2.)

Dennett and the Deep Blue Sea

Burton Voorhees

Journal of Consciousness Studies: vol 7 No 3 (2000)

The article attacks Dennett’s position relative to consciousness and self consciousness, as outlined in his seminal book, ‘Consciousness Explained’, and as such it constitutes an attack on the mainstream orthodoxy of consciousness studies. Vorhees is aware of the strong attachment of the mainstream to Dennett, and suggests that any weaknesses in Dennett’s theory will indicate a weakness in the dominant computational/functionalist approach to consciousness.

Voorhees beliefs that Dennett describes a structure for the mind and then merely assumes rather than proves that such a mind would be conscious. He criticises Dennett’s style or at least his method of arguing, saying that Dennett claims that a lot of steps in his argument are big steps when they are only small steps, and then readers may not notice when he makes a huge leap of assumption. Dennett’s thesis is that consciousness is nothing more than complex computation in the brain, with programming derived from genetics and nurture. One of these programmes is deemed to have the capacity for self-representation or self-consciousness. Events or moments of consciousness are deemed to be the winners in a Darwinian competition between different drafts of perception. There is argued to be no internal witness, no central recgoniser of meaning. Further, the self is argued be a narritative centre of gravity amongst of plethora of stories making up the history of the self, the self in fact being regarded as a convenient fiction by Dennett and an illusion based on a linguistic construct. Meaning is somehow a result of the process of Darwinian selection amongst different drafts of reality. Personal subjectivity is argued to be an illusion, a theme common in reductionist thinking when discussing subjectivity and other aspects of the mind. Voorhees points out that Dennett fails to say who it is that is experiencing the illusion. Another words how could you have an illusion if you weren’t conscious in the first place.

Dennett starts from a traditionalist stand point that consciousness has to be studied from the third person point of view of the traditional observer rather than the first person experience of consciousness. To do this he adopts what he calls the heterophenomenological method. Under this method one takes the results of first person introspection, and adopts a third person approach to them, studying them as if they were literary texts. Dennett’s basic hypothesis is that human consciousness can be understood as the operation of a virtual machine using the parallel architecture or hardware of the brain. Dennett refers to this as a Joycean machine after the meandering of consciousness depicted in James Joyce’s novels. Voorhess, in particular, disputes Dennett’s claim that brains are like computers because they were the inspiration for the design of computers. Voorhees claims that this is not the case. He says that Turing and von Neumann invented computers to practise deductive logic needed for mathematical computation. Recent research is stated to indicate that human brains do not work on this basis, and that it is in fact difficult for brains to learn the rules of logical inference. (Johnson-Laird 1983 & 1988) (1). Von Neumann himself is quoted as saying that the brain contained different logical structures from those normally used in logic and mathematics. Vorhees here criticises Dennett for taking as a premise the thing he is seeking to prove, namely that brains are no different from computers. Vorhees also points out that on p. 215 of ‘Consciousness Explained’, which is really the core part of Dennett’s thesis, he appeals to personal introspection for evidence of a conscious mind, although elsewhere he argues against reliance on such first-person evidence.

Vorhees goes on to examine Dennett’s discussion of zombies. Dennett proposes the idea of a zimbo, a zombie with self-monitoring that provides it with higher-order informational states about its lower order states. Dennett argues that the zimbo could convince itself that it was conscious. He says that if the zimbo was cross questioned sufficiently about why it was making the assertions that it did, it would come to think that it was conscious of these reasons. Vorhees thinks that Dennett deceives the reader by using words such as ‘reflecting’ and ‘knowing’. However, these are the very processes which constitute part of the consciousness experience, so in assuming that the zimbo has these, he is assuming the thing he is trying to prove. If Dennett had said that the zimbo fed back new information into its processing unit to be compared with stored information, there would not appear to be any need to suppose that the zimbo was conscious.

Vorhees also criticises Dennett for appearing to dodge the binding problem, the puzzle as to how the many different components and sense systems that are the content of consciousness are perceived as a single whole. Dennett appears to argue that consciousness and self consciousness arise from a whole series of individual neural processes or events, some of which come to have linguistic form which in turn creates the illusion of an Author for the expereince. Vorhees points out that Dennett does not explain who or what it is that is having an illusion.

Vorhees finally argues that the self-structure tends to be mistaken for consciousness itself rather than just being a part of the contents of consciousness. This tendency appears elsewhere in the mainstream literature where a naive deconstruction of the self into its narritave memory plus the distinction between body and the rest of the world is assumed to have explained consciousness. Vorhees points out that some religious traditions revolve dissolving the false identification between the self and the underlying consciousness.

3.)

How could conscious experience affect brains?

Max Velmans

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, No. 11, 2002, pp. 3-29

The article starts by reminding us that in everyday life we have a working assumption that the conscious mind controls some of our actions. In some medicine the use of imagery can be seen to be therapeutic. Conventional medicine tends to duck out of this being an issue by referring any conscious type influence to brain functions, which begs the question as to the basis of consciousness. However, non-reductionist acccounts of consciousness have to contend with the apparent causal closure of universe. Science takes it for granted that the operation of physical systems can be entirely explained in physical terms. Against this however, there is a large body of evidence that states of mind can affect states of the body (Barber, 1984) (Sheikh et al, 1996) (Sheikh, 2001). Conscious states are also known to influence a wide range of autonomic body functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels and the functioning of the immune system (Baars & McGovern, 1996). There is also the widespread incidence of the placebo effect in medecine, where the efficacy of new drugs is routinely measured against the placebo effect. The placebo effect has led onto a dispute within medecine as to whether placebo only effects how patients feel or whether it can effect their actual organic state, with studies favouring both views (Skrabanek & McCormik, 1989) (Wall, 1996) (Hashish et al, 1988). It seems curious that Velmans at this point in the argument seems to assume that mind or consciousness has to be non-physical. If we see it as a physical property or process, it having an effect on the body does not conflict with the more fundamental concept of the causal closure of the physical universe. The problem seems to be the tendency of most commentators including reductive scientists to slip into the assumption that there is a non-physical mind or consciousness, and once this assumption has been made, convoluted arguments have to be dragged in to exclude the conscious mind from any influence on the body.

Studies by Sheikh et al, (1996) are claimed to show imagery allowing mental control over body states such as heart rate. This leaves a need to explain how images can impact the physical matter of the brain. In medicine this is often related to refocusing attention, but this does not in practise say much about the physical processes that are going on. In particular, it has been shown that the immune system can be modulated by the autonomic nervous system and by centrally produced peptides There are efferent pathways to the immune system that are influenced by inputs from the cortex and the limbic system. There is a complex two way flow between the brain and the immune system including exchanges of neuropeptides.

Velmans, like other commentators, points out that if one examines the functioning of the brain from a third person point of view, one can trace stimuli the whole way from input to output with no gap where consciousness might be needed. No subjective experience can be observed at work. It is the same if the brain is viewed as a computer or information system rather than a biological structure. Once a procedure has been specified there is no need for consciousness. The functions can be performed by a non-conscious machine. Velmans also discusses how most of the actual activities of the brain, even ones which are associated with consciousness, do not actually involve conscious effort. One is not conscious of the mechanisms by which speech is produced. Similarly an image one is conscious of experiencing may change one’s heart rate, but one is not conscious of the process by which this happens. The pre-conscious speech processes are however allowed to sometimes be the result of conscious planning of what to say. Speech production is seen as a hierarchy going from meaning, to grammar to motor control. Things that haven’t been said before require more planning, and this new speech is characterised by hesitations not found in more habitual speech. Breathing pauses occur at the beginning and end of clauses or sentences, but thought pauses can occur in the middle of these. These may be associated with consciousness of mental effort. The same pattern is claimed to be true of unspoken thoughts. Velmans touches on the Libet experiment with readiness potentials, but like other commentators does not comment on the fact this focussed purely on a trivial preplanned action and not on longer term deliberation over decisions in which consciousness might be expected to have a more important role. Velmans regards both dualist and materialist arguments as ridiculous. The dualists do not explain how a non-physical consciousness could act on the material world. The materialists are seen as trying to evade the question by ignoring cliical evidence that consciousness can affect body states.

Velmans is trying to reconcile the evidence that consciousness can have effects with the causal closure of the physical world. He says that in the individuals life there is first person and third person knowledge. He takes an example. The first person experience of the image of a pleasant summers day may have a calming effect, leading to a slower pace of breathing. From the third person point of view of the external observer there is only the slower breathing, or possibly some neural correlates of what has gone on, but not the actual experience of the image of the summer's day. Velmans suggests studying the relationship between the neural correlate and consciousness. Velmans assumes that the conscious experience and the neural correlates represent the same thing, and encodes the same information about it. The experience involves the image of the summers day and associated feelings such as lying on the grass. Velmans sees the correlates and the experience as the same information structure in two different formats. The difference is accounted for by the difference in observational arrangements as between experiencing and brain scanning. The two things are described as complimentary. For this, Velmans also uses the example of the doctor and patient. The patient experiences pain, the doctor observes the patient from the outside plus the observation of scans instruments etc and the two accounts are complimentary in assessing the illness. Neither account is uniquely privileged over the other. Both are needed to give a complete account of what is going on. Velmans goes on from this to look at the question of physical/mental interactions and mental/physical interactions, which are described as mixed-perspective accounts. A perspectival switch is claimed to have taken place.

At this point, Velmans returns to the theme of the Libet experiment. Again he does not question the trivial nature of the focus of Libet’s experiment but takes it as a fact that all conscious experiences, presumably including thoughts come to late to effect the processes they relate to. Given the narrow scope of Libet’s experiment this appears to weaken the structure of Velmans subsequent argument. Inner processing may be required to produce a conscious thought in itself, so some non-conscious processing has to come first, but that does not of itself prevent the conscious thought having an effect on some subsequent actions, particularly actions that are a good deal mor than 150ms into the future. But Velmans seems to evade following up this possibility. Velmans goes on to try and build on the fact that we only experience the extrnal world after things have happened out there, to imply that this is the same as the Libet readiness potential and therefore all brain processing as to be like that relative to consciousness, but the flimsiness of the original Libet structure makes this whole process unconvincing.

Going back to the question of representations, he says that there are three types, representations of the external world, representations of the body, and representations of brain states such as thoughts. Velmans thinks that we don’t have the detail of the conscious workings because for normal purposes we don’t need them. He points out that many skills that are learnt consciously are subsequently relegated to the unconscious part of the brain. Representations in our brains are not the actual world but for practical purposes we treat them as if they were.

In the end, Velmans, like others before him, tries to have his cake and eat it, by trying to have efficacious consciousness at the same time as free will. He insists on the flimsy basis of the Libet experiment that all conscious thought and action is pre-processed, but he then doubles back and suggests that the unconscious processing is somehow free. But just in case we should think that unconscious agency was possible it is insisted that the unconscious processing is also deterministic thus apparently contradicting the idea of being free.